Notes on Living by Lauren Cerand

Become a Fan

Search

On Assurance

I've been reading two books at once over the holiday break: High Financier, a biography of Siegmund Warburg, and More Was Lost, the memoir of Eleanor Perenyi's wartime marriage to an Eastern European minor aristocrat, crumbling manor and all. Warburg is forced to leave his native Germany by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, and Perenyi chooses to flee the Kafka-esque scenario unfolding on the edge of the Iron Curtain as it sweeps down. In both books, much correspondence is exchanged on the subject of when to leave. Ancient systems of order and society were undone in a matter of months and years, and modernization hastened the demise of old customs as war annihilated the rest. Reliable information was extremely scarce. Describing a period of exile at the Ritz, Perenyi recalls, "It was a world where a Frenchman said to me, 'There will be no attack till spring. The mistresses of the Ministers have come back to Paris.'"

Comments

Do you read Alan Furst? His books are basically spy novels taken to a new level, and you quickly realize there was so much more going on behind the scenes in the years leading up to WW II than you'll ever find in a history book. But what makes him such a good read is his ability with time and place. Never have the grand old cities of Europe been so deliciously illustrated in words.

Also, "My Queer War," by James Lord, a memoir published posthumously a year or so ago, is a real eye-opener. He manages to meld the absurdities of a life in wartime with its ultimate horrors, and most tellingly, lifts the veil of secrecy from the important and unacknowledged role of gay men in our military history. In this account, gay soldiering doesn't sound so bad after all. The reality has always been that, once you're on the ground, in the eyes of the military machine a soldier is a soldier and nobody much cares who's gay and who's not.